On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 5:43 PM Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 06, 2021 at 08:57:45PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 3/6/21 6:52 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > One of the most frequent comments on new work proposals is 'no need to
> > re-invent the wheel'.
In the ASN.1 thread my point was that we should know well what came
before before we replace it.
Yes, I was making a completely serious proposal.
Surveying the defects in the existing state of affairs is an important part of the process.
Sometimes the old wheel has nothing worth saving other than the idea of
it, and when the pain of using that old wheel gets bad enough, we must
re-invent it.
If re-inventing stuff was always a bad idea, we would still be using the telephone network.
Doing it ahead of time is risky and has opportunity costs
such that the new wheel needs to be that much better than the old to be
worth pursuing early -- it's an economic analysis problem.
Or another possibility is that new approach is fused with the legacy.
